Elon Musk’s latest objection to the $ 44 billion deal he signed to buy Twitter is that the company has not provided enough information. That, Musk’s lawyers allege, has made it impossible for him to get a loan, one of the few conditions that would allow the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX to leave the deal.
Except this argument probably won’t work. On June 8, Twitter gave Musk access to his entire “fire sleeve,” a stream of tweets and metadata about them that spans 500 million tweets a day, according to The Washington Post.
Musk had initially claimed in May that Twitter had misrepresented the number of robots it counted as users in its public documents. Given that he already signed the agreement, which did not mention anything about robots, it is unlikely that this line of argument would give Musk a legal way out.
But that’s no longer really the issue, because the last argument from Musk’s lawyers was that Twitter wouldn’t give him enough information about his user base to get his loans and complete the deal. This will be much harder to prove now that Twitter has given you access to the fire hose.
The Twitter user base has always been unclear
All public social media companies report their usernames to shareholders. But most companies like Meta, Snap, and Pinterest use monthly active users (MAUs) or daily active users (DAUs).
In 2019, Twitter created its own statistic called monetizable daily active users (mDAU). It’s a measure of the number of Twitter users who can post ads on a given day, though it’s not entirely clear what that explains. Twitter recently admitted to exceeding its user numbers.
In order for Musk to drink from the fire hose that has just been delivered to Twitter, so to speak, he should have a team of data scientists decipher what bot activity is and what not, determines which users are “monetizable” and when they are logged in, and then guess how many bots were counted as monetizable users.
It’s an impossible task and possibly a brilliant move for Twitter. This probably undermines Musk’s argument that Twitter is not giving him the information he needs to get his loans. If there’s one thing Twitter has just given you, it’s information. They just gave him too much.